In spite of great effort aimed at eradication, the malaria epidemic still claims over 600,000 lives each year, and 50% of the world is at risk of contracting the disease. The most deadly form of malaria is caused by Plasmodium falciparum, which is spread from human to human via the female Anopheles mosquito. P. falciparum's lifecycle, which includes both sexual and asexual reproduction, facilitates rapid evolution in response to drug pressure, resulting in the emergence of resistant strains against every antimalarial medication that has been deployed. There is a great need for new antimalarial drugs.
Chloroquine (CQ), an aminoquinoline drug deployed in the 1940s, was an inexpensive, effective and safe drug but now has been rendered ineffective throughout much of the tropical regions due to the emergence of CQ-resistant strains of P. falciparum. A new class of hybrid drugs, called Reversed-CQs, has been developed by linking a molecule with a CQ-like moiety to a molecule with a reversal agent (RA) moiety; an RA is a chemosensitizer that can reverse CQ-resistance. The prototype Reversed-CQ, PL01, was shown to be effective in vitro against sensitive and resistant P. falciparum cell cultures, with IC50 values of 2.9 and 5.3 nM, respectively, in comparison to IC50 values for CQ which were 6.9 and 102 nM, respectively.
In the course of the Reversed-CQ research, PL74 was synthesized with a pyridine ring replacing the quinoline ring. It was expected that PL74 would display reversal agent activity but would not display antimalarial activity. However PL74 showed antimalarialactivity with IC50 values of 185 and 169 nM in vitro against CQ-sensitive and CQ-resistant strains, respectively. In the investigation of PL74 it has been found that this molecule has a pyridinium salt structure, novel to the Reversed-CQ compounds, and through a structure-activity relationship (SAR) study, it was shown to have activity that may indicate a mode of action different from the Reversed-CQ compounds. A study of the literature revealed that pyridinium salt compounds, with some similarity to PL74, were found to operate as choline analogs inhibiting the biosynthesis of phosphatidylcholine as their main antimalarial mode of action.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:pdx.edu/oai:pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu:open_access_etds-2821 |
| Date | 02 June 2014 |
| Creators | Hodson Shirley, Cheryl Anne |
| Publisher | PDXScholar |
| Source Sets | Portland State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Dissertations and Theses |
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